Donald's Blog
October 21, 2024 Saul Bellow
from To Jerusalem and Back: (on Sartre) A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. T.S. Eliot once spoke of statesmen as the foremost of the Gadarine swine. Ah, if it were only the statesman. There are so many others in the stampede. ========== I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. August 11, 2024 The real news
Barton Swaim, reviewing Nancy Pelosi's book "The Art of Power" in the WSJ, writes that the Republicans won the House of Representatives in 2010 "because the Affordable Care Act was wildly unpopular and because Mrs Pelosi pushed a similarly unpopular carbon-regulation bill". Not so. Most people wouldn't know carbon regulation from their toothpaste, and Obamacare was never that unpopular. The nation had been plunged into the Great Depression in 2007-8 because of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market, and the Bush administration and then the Obama administration concocted the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was a good and necessary thing, but bailed out the banks who had allowed the Ponzi scheme, doing nothing for the many thousands of people who were losing their homes (troubled assets, indeed). The Tea Party swept the House in 2010 because Americans were angry: it was as though ordinary folks had no government at all. July 19, 2024 Civility is as Civility does
Richard B. McKenzie, a professor emeritus of economics at UC Irvine, has written a piece about incivility in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, in which he says that Joe Biden "has repeatedly called Mr. Trump a 'loser', a 'clown', an 'insurrectionist' and an 'existential threat to democracy'" as examples of it. I am reminded of the time somebody, probably on Twitter, complained that Hillary Clinton had taken the attitude that appearing on stage with Trump had been 'demeaning'. Her gleeful response: "It was!" Elsewhere in yesterday's paper there was an article titled "The Smearing of Judge Aileen Cannon". How do you smear a clown? Gives me something to chuckle about. July 19, 2024 The Great American Songbook
My French pal, Claude Newman, has published a 500-page book called "L'Age d'or de la Chanson américaine & Ses Paroliers". Claude, like me, is a big jazz fan, and a fan of the Great American Songbook. The book is about the lyrics of the songs. He had some doubt that the French would read it, because they think their chansons are the best, but the French are jazz lovers, many of them speak some English, and they know the songs because jazz musicians love to play them, so maybe they'll be curious about the lyrics by the greatest American songwriters of the 20th century. I wish Claude the greatest luck with this lovely book! (The publisher is Ressouvenances.) May 28, 2023 five years ago today - worth preserving I can be a liberal, a conservative and a socialist, because unlike most people nowadays, I know the meanings of those words. One of the reasons I enjoy the Wall Street Journal is that the denizens of that precinct almost all imprison themselves in this or that ideology, which allows me to feel effortlessly superior. Mr. Barton Swaim seems to have joined the paper as a book reviewer specializing in politics, and consistently refuses to set himself free. Joseph Epstein, for example, another scribe in the WSJ stable who can be an amusing writer, seems to think that our Social Security and Medicare will inevitable lead to Soviet-style communism, while Mr. Swaim recognizes the reality, in Scandinavian countries for example, of democratic socialism. Yet he disapproves of it, and never really tells us why. This holiday weekend he has reviewed two books about the election of 2016, as well as Bernie Sanders' own "My Revolution". He writes that Bernie "holds democratic self-rule to be sacred and inviolable, but he's prepared to transfer enormous power to a coercive and impersonal government that cares little for the people's will." Presumably this is as opposed to a Wall Street that lies awake at night worrying about the welfare of the 98%. Mr. Swaim has already pointed out that those Scandinavian countries "recognize the need for a robust market economy" to pay for their welfare states, which leaves the implication that we would necessarily be incompetent in that regard. Mr. Swaim goes on to quote Bernie on the lessons he learned growing up in the streets of Brooklyn: "Nobody supervised us. Nobody coached us. Nobody refereed our games. We were on our own. Everything was organized and determined by the kids themseves. The group worked out our disagreements, made all the decisions, and learned to live with them." Mr. Swaim does not say what is wrong with the obvious point that those boys have now been grown up for a long time – indeed, they have grandchildren – and they still want to make their own decisions. They would like to have guaranteed health care for all, like every other country in the western capitalist/democratic world, and for their grandchildren they would like to have affordable higher education, and jobs that pay something more than an insultingly low wage plus food stamps. And they would still like to learn to live with their decisions, if all the lobbyists and time-serving politicians would get out of the way. Mr. Swaim goes on to say some interesting things about the books he is reviewing, and for example pays tribute to some "refreshing plainspokenness", but he also revives the myth of "Mrs. Clinton's deliberate use of a private email server to send classified information", an unproven assertion. We are left with the tragedy of a pundit who is determined to keep his head in a place where the light will never shine. February 9, 2022 two years old but worth repeating February 9, 2020 · Mattia Ferraresi, an Italian journalist and a Nieman fellow at Harvard, writes in the WSJ that "today, concepts like safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggression, intersectionality, de-platforming and other American buzzwords are gaining ground on French campuses." But his next paragraph made me laugh out loud. "The French critic Pascal Bruckner has described the current atmosphere as a result of an 'import- export transaction' between France and the U.S. 'The identity politics and the P.C. culture that is central to the campus ideology in America came out of French theory,' he said, referring to the work of influential thinkers of the 1970s such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. 'We’ve invented this, and now it’s coming back,' Mr. Bruckner said." My eyes used to glaze over in decades past, reading about these these crackpot wanna-be philosophers in the TLS and elsewhere. A French friend who was in college in the 1970s describes their work as "empty, pompous, snobbish platitudes and approximations (...) and dangerously intolerant." I wonder if they intended to inspire the ignorant anarchists of today. March 30, 2021 I'm not really back. Can't be bothered. But I promised to say more about Conrad Black. I have finished reading his 1200-page biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and I can't tell you how much I enjoyed it, loaded with detail about the most significant events of my lifetime. I got this terrific book downloaded to my Kindle from Amazon for about $3. While I was reading it I discovered that Black had also written about Donald Trump, a much shorter book; very curious, I took that out of the library and read that. On almost every page Black has to admit that Trump's problems and shortcoming were due to his loose mouth and his bad taste, but he makes the best case for Trump that he can, which is not saying much, so I'm not going to say much about it, except that I do not understand how anyone who obviously admires FDR very greatly can turn out to be a Trumper. On Twitter nowadays Black seems to think that restricting voting to one weekday a year during hours when most people are working is hunky-dory, and presumably that legislation in states like Georgia, which is obviously primarily aimed at black voters, is also just dandy. It's a mystery. Goodbye again. February 10, 2021 I'm back. (He said to the closet.) I have decided to resume blogging occasionally. Everything around me is so interesting, and I can comment to my heart's content. Maybe turning 80 has been an impetus: I may as well pretend that I am immortal. I posted this on Facebook today: “Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot [of 6 January 2021] showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades,” reports the Washpo. Well, of course. The reason they are frustrated enough to make fools of themselves and get arrested for smashing up the Capitol is that they have no financial security. Their fathers and grandfathers belonged to unions and had good jobs, but all that has been wrecked since the Reagan years by the foolish greed of the richest people in the country, and today's working people are so ignorant they think that supporting a charlatan like Trump is the answer. Addendum: I am reading A President Like No Other, by Conrad Black, an encomium of Trump. This was published in 2018 and I wondered if he regrets writing it in light of recent events, but according to his Twitter feed, he thinks that the second impeachment is outrageous. (Maybe it is simply that he has no taste.) There will be more about this book anon. Just now the point is that Lord Black (for he is a member of the House of Lords) has written that "most parents" in the USA blame the decline in our IQ on public schoolteachers. Without questioning his assertion that there has been a decline in our IQ, whatever IQ is or is not, I wonder whether a couple of generations of addiction to crap pop jmusic, "reality" TV, video games, social media etc etc might not be partly responsible for the ignorance of today's working people, mentioned above. As I have been saying for some time, we are all afloat on a sea of trash. February 10, 2019 Ralph Northam should not resign. I do not think that the governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, should resign. The people who want him to do so are frightened politicians who are ignorant of the history of their own culture. To begin with, blackface means minstrelsy. It is almost within living memory that minstrelsy was the most popular form of public entertainment in the USA, so popular that white performers blacked up to get a piece of the action. Al Jolson (1886-1950) was one of the biggest stars of the 20th century, famous for blacking up ('My Mammy', 'Swanee' etc). Two successful biopics were made: young Larry Parks played Jolson, who sang in the soundtracks of The Jolson Story (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (1949), and Parks blacked up in both of them. (Teenagers bought Jolson's records, because they thought he looked like Parks.) The career of Sophie Tucker (1884-1966) lasted until TV appearances on the Ed Sullivan show. She blacked up as a youngster, and remained a coon-shouter, though the term went out of fashion. The new pop songs of the late 19th-early 20th century evolved from minstrelsy and ragtime; they were called coon songs, and were an advance, because they were written in the vernacular that people actually spoke ('Some Of These Days', 'After You've Gone') as opposed to the polite parlor songs of the likes of Carrie Jacobs Bond. The black songwriter Ernest Hogan (1865-1909) came from minstrelsy to write 'All Coons Look Alike To Me', about a black girl who dumps her boyfriend for another guy with more money. Hogan may not have lived long enough to be embarrassed by his own biggest hit, but the word 'coon' wasn't offensive when he used it. If you grew up in the modern world, especially in the South I should think, you deny or ignore your own past at your peril. By the 1980s blackface must have been a joke. The Ku Klux Klan was certainly not funny in the 1870s or in the 1920s, but did the the ridiculous costume have to be taken seriously by college kids in the 1980s? If Northam blacked up to imitate Michael Jackson, and others did it to imitate rappers, that was because they admired the music, just as their ancestors admired minstrelsy. And what about that page in Northam's college yearbook? (I have a yearbook, but it's not 'mine'; I share with a couple of hundred other kids.) Who produced and designed the yearbook? Who chose the pictures? How is any of this Northam's fault? No, Northam should not resign. He has shown himself to be a man of the right sort, which is how he got elected in the first place. He should tough it out, telling the guardians of ignorance that they are the ones who are intoterant. June 15, 2018 Stick a fork in me, I'm done I can't post or comment or share any more about politics; I don't wish to remind myself that I am ashamed to be an American in today's world. All of my aunts and uncles and now my son have served in the armed forces so that a president could make us a laughing-stock, and rip babies from the arms of their mothers? Screw it. Who needs it. May 29, 2018 The Times Literary Supplement
I've been reading the weekly Times Literary Supplement, founded in 1902, for nearly 50 years, turned onto it by my then father-in-law in Washington DC. I still remember the first issue that didn't have the table of contents on the cover, in 1974: instead it was an exploded drawing of a motorcycle, noting the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance. The weekly has been changing more lately, and now I see why. The new editor for a couple of years has been Stig Abell, who has just been profiled in the New York Times. He was recruited from The Sun, the rather nasty tabloid that used to be famous for photos of big boobs on page 3. He was nominated for the new job by Rebekah Brooks, who had been the editor of the gossip tabloid News Of The World when it had to be closed after it had hacked the cellphone of a missing teenager who turned out to have been murdered. Brooks escaped going to jail when a jury believed her protestation of ignorance, and is now CEO of Rupert Murdoch's News UK. (Yes, Murdoch owns the TLS, but has pretty much left it alone, so far.) Stig is a nickname from a children's novel. As the profile in the NYT pointed out, it would be difficult to imagine our Stig in tweeds. He is one of those youngish men who appears fashionable by pretending that he can't afford to buy a razor. I do not know whether he is covered with tattoos or wears a baseball cap backwards, but he has a double first in English from Oxford University. I suppose he can be best understood as a symbol of how everything is changing around us. I used to read almost everything in the TLS; I often drew the line at philosophy, which can make my eyes glaze over. Nowadays I notice more reviews of books about pop music, er, I mean rock. In a recent issue the lead review covered three books about mothers and motherhood, right around the time of Mother's Day ("Mothering Sunday" in Britain). I confess that I only skimmed it. But I still find a lot to read in the paper, and, well, let's face it, of my favorites, Eric Korn is long gone, and Hugo Williams is almost as old as I am. (NB or J.C. on the back cover, whoever he is, is still as feisty as ever.) And Stig must be doing something right: it is still high-class as literary papers go, and to my surprise it is said to be the fastest-growing weekly in Britain. I guess I'll stick with it for now. May 28, 2018 The tragedy of the chattering class
I can be a liberal, a conservative and a socialist, because unlike most people nowadays, I know the meanings of those words. One of the reasons I enjoy the Wall Street Journal is that the denizens of that precinct almost all imprison themselves in this or that ideology, which allows me to feel effortlessly superior. Mr. Barton Swaim seems to have joined the paper as a book reviewer specializing in politics, and consistently refuses to set himself free. Joseph Epstein, for example, another scribe in the WSJ stable who can be an amusing writer, seems to think that our Social Security and Medicare will inevitable lead to Soviet-style communism, while Mr. Swaim recognizes the reality, in Scandinavian countries for example, of democratic socialism. Yet he disapproves of it, and never really tells us why. This holiday weekend he has reviewed two books about the election of 2016, as well as Bernie Sanders' own My Revolution. He writes that Bernie "holds democratic self-rule to be sacred and inviolable, but he's prepared to transfer enormous power to a coercive and impersonal government that cares little for the people's will." Presumably this is as opposed to a Wall Street that lies awake at night worrying about the welfare of the 98%. Mr. Swaim has already pointed out that those Scandinavian countries "recognize the need for a robust market economy" to pay for their welfare states, which leaves the implication that we would necessarily be incompetent in that regard. Mr. Swaim goes on to quote Bernie on the lessons he learned growing up in the streets of Brooklyn: "Nobody supervised us. Nobody coached us. Nobody refereed our games. We were on our own. Everything was organized and determined by the kids themseves. The group worked out our disagreements, made all the decisions, and learned to live with them." Mr. Swaim does not say what is wrong with the obvious point that those boys have now been grown up for a long time – indeed, they have grandchildren – and they still want to make their own decisions. They would like to have guaranteed health care for all, like every other country in the western capitalist/democratic world, and for their grandchildren they would like to have affordable higher education, and jobs that pay something more than an insultingly low wage plus food stamps. And they would still like to learn to live with their decisions, if all the lobbyists and time-serving politicians would get out of the way. Mr. Swaim goes on to say some interesting things about the books he is reviewing, and for example pays tribute to some "refreshing plainspokenness", but he also revives the myth of "Mrs. Clinton's deliberate use of a private email server to send classified information", an unproven assertion. We are left with the tragedy of a pundit who is determined to keep his head in a place where the light will never shine. May 7, 2018 Plonk is as plonk does Steve Mnuchin visits Jared Kushner "and takes along a $22 bottle of wine -- despite being worth $300 million", writes the Daily Mail. That's almost three times what I spend on lovely bottles of Bogle. Does the Mail think Mnuchin got rich by spending hundreds on a bottle of wine? Oh, and he "dresses down" for the visit. The Mail doesn't like jeans. But then I seem to recall that the Mail is written for the wives of the men who think they run the country. May 6, 2018 Forward Ho I was astonished by a childish rant from a surgeon on 27 March. Then I was astonished again when the Interventional Radiology people finally called after about six weeks. I'm having another surgery in a couple of days, and I'm feeling optimistic. The pain for weeks now has been bearable (with the help of Tramadol) and predictable, rather than constantly up and down--at one point in March I could not go to the bathroom ten feet away without crutches. If it's going to be third time lucky, I'll be able to stop taking the damned pills. Furthermore, I have started the two-year course of injecting myself every day to make my bones stronger, which will also accelerate the healing of the damaged vertebrae, and I'm getting the drug for free, thanks to Lilly Cares, and a different doctor, a grown-up this time. May 6, 2018 Louie: gone but not forgotten We acquired Louie when he was about six months old. He was effectively a rescue, because the people who owned him had no idea what they were doing; he had already sired a litter. Like most animals, he had a personality all his own; he had never been on a lead, never been for a walk, never ridden in a car, but he learned quickly. He tore Polly the Parrot to pieces, buried a moose somewhere, and never touched another stuffed toy. Never chased a ball, a frisbee or a stick, but went nuts over the red laser dot; when we lived in Allentown (2009-2014) he would chase it all over the house, and if I got tired of playing with the pen, he would leap at my hand: he knew that the red dot was coming from there!
|